ABSTRACT
Carl Gustav Jung (1875±1961), a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, engaged with matters that were central to the formation of psychology as a modern science in the early twentieth century (Shamdasani, 2003). In the long run, that science did not engage with Jung. A recent textbook by Harre (2005), Key Thinkers in Psychology, does not mention Jung. Rom HarreÂ, himself a key thinker in postmodern psychology, has his own agenda in how he tells the history of psychology. In the traditional mainstream, Jung may be accredited with the distinction between introversion and extroversion, but his understanding of the typology was almost immediately overwritten. The distinction became a criterion for describing individual differences, understood as biologically based. To Jung, it signi®ed different attitudes or stances underpinning human understanding (1921, CW 6). Jung's major contribution as a twentieth-century thinker is arguably not the personality types but his slant on the emergence of meaning in human activities. With the notable exception of Piaget (1962), who contends with Jung's account of symbol formation in his La Formation du symbole chez l 'enfant (®rst published in 1946), the Jungian account was not picked up by psychologists as something worth bothering even to criticize. His effort to understand the meaning of meaning is best examined
against the historical Project of Psychology, rather than evaluating its role in the history of the discipline as such. Several histories can be (and have been) told about how psychology became a modern science. But its project as a whole is best viewed as a culturally and historically speci®c expression of a quest for knowledge that transcends cultures and historical eras.
